


pyromania, in c minor

by belatrix



Category: The Mentalist
Genre: Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Dystopia, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-25
Updated: 2016-09-26
Packaged: 2018-05-03 08:07:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 17,877
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5283227
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/belatrix/pseuds/belatrix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is not a love story. Forget all about textbook revenge, too. Ghosts can't torment you if you're not alive. </p><p>[Jane and Red John find each other, after the world breaks apart.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. wings off flies

**Author's Note:**

> ...Well, I don't even know. This exists, for some reason. I have some sort of outline planned, but I have no idea how long it will be, exactly. I'm pretty sure there'll be no less than 10 chapters.
> 
> Character deaths galore, guys. Warnings include mental instability & mentions of suicide (Jane is not particularly happy here, and none of the guys is particularly sane), and Red John-typical awfulness, which will be more prominent in later chapters. Hence the M rating, but that will be more relevant later on.

 

 

Somehow, by some cruel, awful twist of fate, they are the ones still standing, watching the fire burn with the kind of intensity that is reserved solely for those who want to burn with it.

The world is a bright red flame, swallowed whole by curtains of smoke. The world is gone.

And if God exists, he’s an unrepentant sadist, because the two of them are all that's left.

 

 

After everything is said and done and gone, Jane sees him across the array of bodies, half-swallowed in pre-dawn blues and greys like a twisted sort of primordial ghost, a figure out of bad dreams you can't quite recall upon waking up.

He draws nearer, steps slow, and stops to examine the bodies scattered across the burned-black earth, painted in blood. Jane himself would be unable to pry his own gaze from the one at his feet, were the instinctive hatred he felt at the man’s mere presence not keeping him alert, attention focused, burning. Red John pauses, goes still, almost inhumanly unmoving. It’s not exactly fear that plays across his features, but Jane recognizes the flash of dawning comprehension, near-shattering in its intensity, on the man’s face. Terror does not spring, it blooms.

After what feels like hours, drawn-out and tortuous, Red John finally lifts his head, blinks as if the sight before him is utterly incomprehensible. “How is it,” he says quietly, with something like accusation lacing his words, “that after all of this, _you_ managed to survive?”

The morning sun throws a hazy glow over what used to be the bustling center of Sacramento, and Jane’s gaze is glued, hollow and unblinking, to the mangled limbs and singed clothes on the ground, to the pale face smudged with soot and mud; slightly upturned nose almost touching his ankle, chapped white lips slightly parted, green eyes shining like cold, cold glass. She'd been furious and desperate just last night, caught up in some elaborate con of his gone wrong. So much paperwork. Angry relatives. But the case was closed.

He memorizes everything; every pore of once smooth skin, every strand of dark hair. The hollowness between the collarbones, the shape of the eyebrows.

When he speaks, his voice belongs to a stranger. “Luck, I suppose.”

But he knows this is not luck. _This is not luck_.

Red John holds his gaze for a long, long minute that stretches on like nails scoring along skin, before he blinks again, nods so faintly that Jane might have imagined it. “Well,” he starts, and seems to falter, seems to reconsider― “ _Well_.”

And he turns to leave, starts walking with a detached sort of purpose between the ruins and the bodies and the blood, like he never intends to look back.

Jane stills. He realizes with something like a punch in the stomach that he cannot think. That his mind can’t quite function the way he wants it to ―the way it used to. That he’s alone in a sea of glowing embers and mist and corpses.

He takes a step forward.

“Wait.”

 

 

The night is cold, too cold for the aftermath of flames licking at bodies and reducing buildings to ash and debris. Jane sits, knees apart, head tilted back, and stares at the endless expanse of black sky above, at the silver dots etched into the patches of darkness, like the glinting faraway eyes of a beast born in a fairytale. He feels empty. He feels light, so light, like his body is nothing, like he might float into the coolness of the night and get lost between all those dead, glittering stars.

There is movement, somewhere behind him. Footfalls across the uneven ground, something like a pair of hands lifting objects, running over fabric, it doesn’t matter, none of it does. Jane wonders, briefly, if this is all a dream. It feels like one. Like he’s underwater; muffled sounds, blurry sight, getting lost between waves crashing into each other.

Inside his head, there are screams. High, desperate, pained, cutting into the fragments of what he might have called his soul, once, like polished blades through soft flesh. Inside his head, he doesn’t see blood, but a vast, vast nothing.

Red John walks up to him, all careful limbs and a piercing gaze and a hand that is suddenly on Jane’s shoulder, too gentle and too rough, too light and too heavy, too alien and too familiar. Jane does not move. He keeps looking at the stars, all those beautiful stars.

 

 

Their food supplies end before a week has passed.

“We have to _eat_ ,” Red John says, his voice piercing through the white-hot noise of the numbness in Jane’s mind like some sort of determined, unyielding knife. They’re the first words he's spoken since they left, or maybe they’re just the first words Jane has bothered to hear and understand. He isn’t sure he remembers what hunger is supposed to feel like. “We’ll find no dry food or anything of the sort for miles, and―” a small pause, a slight tilt of the head. “You have absolutely no idea how to hunt, do you?”

Jane does not look at him. He can hear birds calling, lilting and merry, such an incongruous thing against the backdrop of everything. The sun is a bright, grinning thing onto the sky, and he lets golden light wash over his face, burn his skin like benediction. He closes his eyes and breathes in, long and deep.

He hears a soft sort of sound, almost like a sigh. “Oh, Patrick,” the other man says, low and quiet, and he wants to _scream_. “Stay here. I’ll be back before nightfall.”

The birds sing. They always just sing. _Is there anywhere else I can go?_ he almost asks, but he manages to stop himself before he goes there.

 

 

Jane holds very, very still as he watches the blade cutting under the dead rabbit’s skin; blood runs in swirling patterns over glinting metal, fur is peeled away. Red John works swiftly, as if he’s done this before, his gaze only focused on the tiny red corpse in his hands for the sake of appearances, it seems.

Black bead eyes open, glassy in death. Impossibly small feet, pinkish paws covered in mud. Mangled fur that was once white, probably.

“Can you cook it, at the very least?” Red John’s voice, incongruously conversational, reaching Jane as if from miles away in the the starlit night. The air is getting cooler, humming with something like danger, with things unnamed. “I can't do everything by myself. You’re going to have to work a little here, Patrick.”

Jane looks down. There’s his wedding ring, a stretch of platinum around his finger, catching and reflecting the firelight with every movement of his hand. It’s an almost mesmerizing, oddly lulling sight, and he keeps looking down, holding his fingers out and close to the fire.

“Have you forgotten how to talk?” Red John asks, but his voice lacks any real vitriol. Jane tries, for a moment, to feel hatred, but only comes up with overwhelming numbness, eclipsing any pain and grief and fury he might have ever felt. It’s a terrifying thing, he knows, not to _feel_ ―but, perhaps, it’s easier than anything else. “I remember a time when trying to make you shut your mouth was an impossible task for anyone who was brave enough to try.”

Jane's gaze alters between his ring, the rabbit, the flames. Ring, rabbit, flames. Platinum, corpse, red.

“Is there a point or purpose to this conversation,” he says, voice flat and empty ―it sounds, even to his own ears, like the words are drawn from a faraway place, like the question is not even a question but rather meaningless words woven, hollow and pointless, into each other.

Red John does not reply, and it’s probably because he knows Jane is not expecting an answer, anyway. The knife stills, buried underneath patches of bloodied fur, and Red John just sits there and stares, with a sort of detached intensity, as if he’s trying to find an opening to Jane’s mind but without any real will to, as if he already knows what he’s going to find there should he look inside.

“I do not intend to die,” he says eventually, and this time Jane does look up, meets Red John’s gaze from across their small excuse of a campfire. There is nothing accusatory about his words, really, but Jane feels like he’s being blamed for things he cannot control, for having been thrust into a nightmare of blood and death and ruins, for― “We’re going to have to help each other, Patrick.”

And, suddenly, irrationally, Jane laughs. He cannot control it; his shoulders quake with the half-hearted effort to stop, but his chest hurts and gasps of laughter leave his throat like wild birds taking flight, soaring high, high, higher than smoke. He laughs, and laughs, and laughs, until his throat is sore and his vision blurred with tears and the laughter begins to sound more like sobs.

Red John watches him. In the end he only says, “There’s whiskey in one of the bags.”

Getting his veins flooded with alcohol has never felt like a better idea.

 

 

( _He takes a step forward._

_“Wait.”_

_And he trips on the body that was the focus of his fervent study just a moment ago. Regains his balance with something like acid catching in his throat, burning on his tongue. He has never been more certain, in his entire life, that he wants to die._

_Red John, already several steps away, pauses, and stills._

_A soft voice, like breathing out smoke― “Yes?”_

_Jane himself can’t, for the life of him, tell the man what he could possibly want from him. Everything is dead and gone and broken, there is nothing left, and this is Red John, and―_

_“I have nowhere to go.”_

_Why does his voice sound so foreign? An empty, tin-can thing._

_He realizes, a moment too late, what exactly he just said. To whom he just said it. He thinks of the body behind him, and he feels cold, so inhumanly cold._

_Red John doesn’t laugh. He doesn’t turn around, either. “Neither do I.”_ )

 

 

The sky glitters, and the night hums. Whether it’s birds or bugs or something else entirely, Jane cannot tell with certainty, and he doesn’t bother to find out.

Jane breathes out, and wonders about all the things that men and monsters alike ponder when they’re drunk and depressed. He thinks of love and loss and death.

Then he thinks of cold skin and beautiful eyes and bloodied sheets and bright, bright flames. He remembers everything and nothing all at once, and there’s a sizzling sensation ripping through him, his skin prickling with the touch of phantom fingers.

“Do you still want to kill me?” Red John asks from somewhere beside him, soft and lilting and oddly dispassionate. He might as well be discussing the weather, and Jane takes another swig of his whiskey, lets the world around him blur into colorful little specks of starlight.

“Yes,” he says. His voice sounds hoarse, ripped from his throat like a cough. “And no.”

“Eloquent as always, Patrick.”

It’s odd for Jane. It has been odd and wrong and terrible since the world started breaking apart. It does not seem right, not in any sense of the word, to be staring at a fire beside Red John instead of trying to push him into it, but he doesn’t dwell on it because the alcohol has clouded his ability to think too clearly. At least he’s sober enough to know that it’s doing its job.

“Not like this,” he clarifies, and in this impossible, ridiculously wrong and companionable silence that has fallen between them, he knows without a shadow of doubt that Red John understands.

 

 

On the fourteenth day, they start moving north.

There is nothing left for them here but endless patches of dry soil and ruined buildings and corpses that have already begun to decompose, and a glaring sun stitched into the sky like a vengeful deity waiting to smite them. In rare flashes of optimistic intuition, Red John suggests that there might be shelters in the northern States, that if others have survived, then surely they will have banded together by now.

They pass through an orchard that must have bright and colorful, filled with life and the sounds of the earth at springtime. Jane’s shoes dig into the mud, and they walk silently, always a measured distance between them, their silences stretching for hours upon hours at a time. There are blackbirds on the sky above, circling along the endless expanse of bone-dry blue, calling, calling, always calling.

“Why do we keep going?” he thinks suddenly, and realizes a little too late that he has said it out loud.

Red John casts him a sideways glance, eyes glinting in the blinding sunlight, and Jane turns away with something tight and awful coiling, clenching inside his chest.

“Our lives are not defined by what we lose,” Red John says, in that light, perfectly dispassionate way of his that Jane has grown accustomed to. It's almost certainly an act, he thinks. “We move on.”

The ghost of a smile, false and half-hearted and forlorn, finds its way across Jane’s lips. “You don’t believe that. If you did, you wouldn’t have―”

He finds that, even though the words are swimming in his mouth, somehow they won’t come out, get stuck behind his teeth instead.  Jane thinks of his family, and their bodies, and the blood. Instead of overwhelming pain, he feels empty.

 

 

It rains, pouring from the skies like sheets of silver knives, and Jane screams into the night.

There are hands on his shoulders, shaking him with a violent sort of urgency, and when he opens his eyes he feels worn and exhausted and sore and there’s Red John’s face, inches away from his own.

He scrambles away in a flurry of kicking limbs and gasping breaths until he’s standing at the edge of their makeshift tent, feeling the rain whipping furiously at his back, soaking through his shirt, chest heaving and hair plastered to his forehead in sweat.

“Patrick,” Red John says, and he sounds concerned. It makes Jane want to scratch and kick and claw at his face until he bleeds and tears at the seams, until he’s screaming and dying and gone, gone, _gone_.

Instead, he only manages to breathe, “I’m fine,” and walk a little further inside, away from the onslaught of pouring rain. Around them, the world cracks with thunder, and lighting splits the night in half for the space of a single breath.

“Bad dream?” Red John asks quietly, almost carefully, and Jane lets his body fall down, heavy and with a muffled thud, onto the old, torn clothes they’ve been using as mattresses.

“Don’t look so worried,” he says, voice laced with something like sarcasm, and he thinks he might be shivering. “I’m not exactly a stranger to those.”

Red John shrugs, and retreats into the side of their pathetic little tent that he, by some unspoken agreement, has claimed as his own. There is no light apart from an impossibly small lantern that burns in weak, halting gasps, and in the broken darkness he looks like Jane had always seen him in his nightmares; a figure limned in shadows, without a face, hands hidden away because they’re maybe splattered with blood, maybe twisted around a neck, maybe―

 

 

( _Red John doesn’t laugh. He doesn’t turn around, either. “Neither do I.”_

_There’s blood smeared across his cheek, and Jane thinks that it could be his own. Or it could be anyone’s. It’s dark and crusting, dried in that color that reminds people of rust. He opens his mouth to say something, anything―_

_―and the earth roars, shakes, and then the ground is splitting in two, breaking apart between Jane’s feet._

_Before he can comprehend, he’s falling._

_There’s dust flying everywhere and the ground beneath him is groaning and screeching, stones crashing into each other, sinking into mud, swallowing the bodies down. Jane thinks that he can maybe taste blood on his tongue ―something metallic, something horribly vile, and he knows that he is going to die, knows that this is the -long overdue- end._

_But Red John saves him._

_He wraps a hand like a vice around Jane’s forearm and pulls him up through the rocks and the smoke and the rolling bodies, away from the center of the earthquake, close to his own body._

_Jane coughs, his heart sputters, and sense memory of being tied_ **down** _floods him ―plastic wrapped around his shoulders, choking wet sounds behind him, a gloved hand, fond and gentle, on his shoulder. For a moment, he’s terrified._

 _“Let me go,” he breathes, and then his voice becomes an animal sound. “Let me go, let me go, let me_ **go** _―”_

_The still functioning part of his brain rationalizes that he is panicking. He struggles, frantic. And then he’s tripping, stumbling, falling again before Red John pulls him back._

_Everyone is dead, everyone is_ gone _, and Teresa has been buried under the earth and he knows he has to go with her―_

 _“Patrick. Patrick, stop,_ stop― _”_

_His breath has left him, and are those tears blurring his vision, burning hot down his cheeks, he thinks they are, they certainly are, and he suddenly feels so impossibly tired that he just stops fighting, goes limp in the arms holding him._

_There is silence afterwards, near-deafening in its vastness, empty and thick and draping over them like a blanket, like a physical thing. Jane slowly disentangles himself from Red John’s mockery of a protective embrace, takes several unsteady steps back. He breathes out._

_“Why did you really ask me to wait?” Red John asks. He sounds so innocently bored with it all and it makes Jane wants to gouge the man’s eyes out with his own nails._

_He turns, looks at the expanding ravine that formed where debris and dead bodies were, mere moments ago._

_He doesn’t have an answer._ )

 

 

They’ve taken to sleeping during the day and walking, walking, endlessly walking during the night.

It’s safer this way, Red John said. Perhaps he is right, perhaps he isn’t, Jane can’t quite bring himself to argue. He knows he doesn’t have enough strength for that.

Some days he does sleep, but mostly he only just pretends. It’s easier than it should be, but a decade’s worth of practice justifies his expertise in making his breathing pattern even, eyes peacefully closed, chest rising and falling slowly, rhythmically. Everyone always fell for it, in the bullpen.

And yet ―Red John isn’t fooled.

“You do _need_ to sleep,” he comments idly, sprawled out across his side of their teetering tent. Jane opens his eyes, allows himself to drop the pretense, and realizes that the sound of _that voice_ doesn’t affect him so much, any more.

“Your concern is touching,” he hears himself say. He turns on his side, closes his eyes again.

And they snap open for the second time when Red John asks, suddenly, “Why did you really ask me to wait?”

It’s been almost a month since _then_ , but Jane still remembers and feels everything, everything. The sight of corpses and the ground breaking open. The fire. _The fire_.

He swallows. “Just let me sleep. I really do _need_ it ―your words, not mine.”

To his mild surprise, it’s quiet after that.


	2. through the glass, darkly

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This took a long time to update, but college is pretty brutal, and what is sleep, I have forgotten.
> 
> If a passage is written entirely in italics, it means it takes place in the past, during Jane and Red John's very first interaction after the "apocalyptic events" that pretty much started the story itself. These passages will be scattered throughout all chapters, so basically Jane and Red John's first "scene" together will span the entire length of the story. I hope it's not too confusing.

 

 

 

 

 

 _And I'm abandoned; I sit and watch while Yes / and No_  
_(I will survive, I won't) wage war inside my head._  
―Dante, tr. by Mary Jo Bang, from  Inferno; Canto VIII

 

* * *

 

 

 

There is something that terrifies him; when they don't talk and the nights drag on far too long and the days feel like being plunged into hazy water, half-dream and half-delirium, when he has nothing to say and nothing to think of and he just cants his head and looks into Red John's eyes ―it's there.

It's like Red John is seeing more than just _Patrick Jane_ when he looks back, more than just the broken man who pursued him with vengeance in his heart for nearly a decade, more than the fake psychic, the interesting adversary, the police consultant, more, more, _more_ than the man. There are times when Red John looks back at him as if he's never seen Jane before, like the latter is the very last thing keeping him rooted to this reality, and if Jane disappeared, he would come unhinged from the world.

And Jane has to force himself to realize that, with everyone they've ever known dead, and everything they've ever known broken and warped beyond recognition, this might be true. He is just as much the last reminder of someplace like home for Red John as the other man is for him.

(There is something that terrifies him; the moments when _something_ passes between them.)

Jane doesn't think himself ―or any human being he has met in his life― articulate enough to accurately describe with words the sensation of looking into a pair of eyes that you want to claw the light out of, and seeing your own emotions reflected back at you.

He doesn't want to _name_ this, whatever it might be.

 

 

They pass through a forest, above an abandoned highway, around the crumbled ruins of a small city. Jane's feet are sore and he won't take off his shoes when they stop for mere minutes at a time, he doesn't want to see the chafed skin and know just how bad the damage is. He doesn't complain, and it's a mild relief that Red John doesn't, either.

On the forty-third day, they stop.

They're on the outskirts of a city Jane does not recognize; the sun has come up fully over the trees, and when he looks down at his hands he sees light fleck his skin with shimmering gold, as if he had dipped his hands in molten moondust or something equally magical and otherworldly ―shimmering fairies and blinking, dancing stars and golden sunlight washing over the hair of mermaids; Charlotte used to love these things. He remembers, for a sharp, vivid second, all her books with their flashing, glossy pictures.

Swallowing, he brushes past Red John to get a better look at the tops of trees scattered unevenly throughout the skyline. None of them seems _burnt_ ; this catches his attention. "Where are we?"

"I'm not entirely sure," Red John says, looking around with the same sort of detached curiosity that is etched across Jane's own face. His _eyes_ , though ―Jane always notices them, how they're always bright with the promise of progress and survival, even if the rest of his face seems blank and dead and resigned. Sometimes, just sometimes, he thinks of telling Red John to stop playing at a tragic victim and wrap himself around the persona of the survivor Jane has no intention of embracing. "But if we managed not to stray from the path we set when we began traveling, this is probably what used to be Roseburg."

"Oh." Jane surveys the split buildings in the distance, the cracks running along the bricks and cement, the film of dust that lingers in the air. "It looks like a ghost town."

"I hope not. We have supplies to pick up ―we're almost out of _everything_."

The casual way in which Red John says this suggests that this is merely a short visit, and even though Jane can't quite bring himself to _truly_ care about where they go next or what Red John thinks the right thing to do is, he feels something bite at him at the thought that Red John has apparently decided to treat him like some sort of baggage, as if his own opinion has no meaning or gravity in their decisions.

For a moment, as in a flash of panicked self-preservation, Jane feels something like anger coil and clench inside him. "If there are people here," he says, voice only slightly harsh, "we should stay longer. Roseburg is practically a _village_ compared to other cities we've been through, and _they_ were all either completely evacuated or burnt to a cinder. If people have managed to stay standing _here_ , we probably have a thing or two to learn from them."

Red John is looking at him with an intensity that would make Jane uncomfortable, or perhaps simply murderous, if he hadn't watched the world breaking apart and ashen corpses being swallowed whole by the rolling earth. Now he only stands and returns the near-belligerent stare, and feels the anger inside him deflate, almost, as if someone had reached inside him and pulled all the pulsing energy out of his veins in one swift, cruel almost, movement.

"If people have managed to stay standing _here_ ," Red John says, voice laced around Jane's own words with a thin sheen of mockery ―as if they're _children_ , Jane thinks, as if anything is the same as it used to be― "then have no doubt that the first thing on their minds will be to eliminate anyone and anything they might view as a potential threat. _Yes_ ," he presses, "the two of us _are_ a potential threat to a group of people who have probably lost everything and everyone and are struggling to survive in a world twisted beyond what they knew all their lives. We're strangers, and people don't trust strangers at the best of times. How welcoming do you think they will be _now_?"

Jane breathes out. The silence that falls between them is oddly light, oddly free of the humming, electrified tension he had anticipated, and he finds that while he doesn't completely agree with everything he just heard, he can't make himself protest, not exactly. He feels tired again, tired and _spent_.

 _Surviving does not mean living_ , he thinks fleetingly, and turns his gaze away. Living and existing, existing and living ―these are things he has been battling with for years, teetering on the precipice of both, ever since he opened his bedroom door to blood and the smell and coldness of death.

Red John takes a small step forward ―when he wraps his fingers around Jane's wrist, near-affectionate in their firm but oddly cautious gentleness, Jane doesn't flinch. "Don't stray from me once we enter the city," Red John says, and Jane almost feels like rolling his eyes. "Trouble will find any pretty face who can't handle a weapon in times like these."

Jane feels as if the void inside him has grown; as if his insides have spilled out and left him. He forces himself to smile, wide and plastic and altogether bellicose. "You think I'm pretty?"

Red John's fingers tighten around his wrist ―only for a second, a fleeting, pressing, heavy second. "You know you are."

 

 

( _"Why did you really ask me to wait?" Red John asks. He sounds so innocently bored Jane wants to gouge the man's eyes out with his own nails._

_He turns, looks at the expanding ravine that formed where debris and dead bodies were, mere moments ago._

_He doesn't have an answer._

_"_ _Well?" Red John presses, but without any real will to_ ― _Jane turns to him and looks him over through the dream-fog that is slowly settling before his eyes, through the incessant buzzing in his ears and the sight of Lisbon's bright eyes disappearing between the rocks and the mud, and all he sees a figure that looks too much like a distorted version of himself; like looking into a funhouse mirror with the edges stuck together all wrong._

_He stands up a little straighter, his gaze wandering over the expanse of dying embers and scattered debris and cracks in the ground, and through the thin sheets of dust that seem to have settled over every surface the eye can reach, he notices that the sun has almost completely risen, a faint trace of gold dancing across the remains of what used to be a city, shimmering along drying pools of blood._

_Red John makes a noise like a sigh and a cough, and tilts his head back, looks up into the sky as if waiting for benediction from the heavens, or maybe a column of hellfire to swallow him whole. Jane realizes that he has gone very still, watching the other man watching the emptiness above, the clouds and the cracked rays of faded light and the trembling pieces of blue peeking through the mists and the smoke._

_He doesn't know why, but suddenly he feels like he has to say_ something _, as if the silence is deafening, as if he's underwater and he's about to drown from the absence of sound and motion and_ life _._

Lisbon _, he thinks, and there's something like a stab of phantom pain rattling his chest for the barest hint of a second. He breathes in, out, in, out. His head has never felt so filled with horrible, unnamed things as it does now._

 _"_ _We can't stay here," he says, because it's the only logical thing to say, because he can't think of anything else to say that will not make him fall to his knees and heave and weep and scream and want to rip his own heart from his chest with his hands._

_Red John turns his gaze to him as if he's surprised Jane has spoken. "No," he says, slow, measured, "we most certainly can't."_

_And_ ― _Jane sees it all as if it were unfolding before him in slow motion, one silver-edged frame after another, like a shaky home movie on continuous loop_ ― _Red John is suddenly not still any more, and he's walking towards Jane, his steps as casual and determined as they were when he turned his back to the smoke and dead bodies as though he never intended to look back, as though such a thing was possible. Jane finds himself holding his breath, like a trapped, terrified animal coiled tight inside his lungs, and his gaze follows every movement, every muscle that moves on Red John's face as he comes to stand right before Jane, something almost_ ― _almost_ broken _and feral and oddly determined dancing in his eyes._

 _"_ _No," Jane repeats, barely above a whisper as the breath leaves his lips in one rushed exhale, "we most certainly can't." He can't recognize the sound of his own voice, and he can feel the blood beating behind his ears, blurring out everything, even his own thoughts._

 _He notices, almost too late, how close Red John is; how their breaths seem to be trapped in the cracked space between their mouths, how those eyes won't leave his own, how he can see_ everything _. How he could reach out a hand and touch or kill, pull close or push away_ ― _it would all be easy, so easy._

 _"_ _What_ ― _"_ _he starts, and it sounds so torn and broken and small that Jane wishes he had never opened his mouth._

 _Red John almost says something, then, seems to reconsider, seems to move, and Jane thinks about animals caught in barb-wire traps, he thinks of running away, or of rushing forward, but then there's Red John's voice pulling him out of the tangled mess of wild, stray pictures and sounds in his head_ ― _"_ _What would you do if I kissed you?"_ )

 

 

Miraculously, all the buildings are still standing, despite the cracks and crevices and the displaced bricks, and the Wal-Mart on the main drag of highway looks open.

They make their way, slowly, carefully, along winding sidewalks lined with unused cars that glimmer weakly in the sun or rot underneath the white layers of dust that settle over every expanding, once-shining surface. There isn't much to see here ―all the stores are closed, save for that one Wal-Mart Jane caught a glimpse of from afar when they first entered the town. Were it not for the fluttering movements in house windows that he catches out of the corner of his eye, Jane would have said the place was as deserted as all the others they'd seen.

Even through the haze of apathy he has found himself plunged into, the instinct to bolt from Red John's side and run to the nearest house and ring the doorbell is strong; he finds himself craving the sight of new faces, _different_ faces, and after more than an endless, stretching month, he's finally walking in the middle of a town filled with living, breathing people, people-who-are-not-Red-John.

He has to keep himself from calling out to someone, anyone ―force himself to suppress the need for interaction with someone new, someone alive, someone who has been through all the fire and the blood and the horror that he has and survived through it _and is not Red John_.

 _We are not wanted here_ , he thinks, and even though every cell in his body does not want to admit this, he knows it's true. _We are not wanted here_.

Much like the sprawling neighborhoods and narrow backstreets, the highway is deserted; the Wal-Mart, though, thrums with people. A mob billows out into the parking lot, shoving at each other as they try to reach the entrance. They stop several dozens of yards away ― "It doesn't seem wise to attract attention to ourselves," Red John says, and Jane doesn't see why he shouldn't agree. "There seems to be quite the commotion," Red John comments idly, hands in his pockets as he tilts his head to study the scene from afar.

"It must be the only place left in town with any food," Jane says, taking a few steps forward, but not straying away from the cover of one of the sideline buildings that they've come to stand behind. "Well, if there's a head manager, he's definitely an enterprising man ―the whole place seems locked up tight, there are even a few armed guards at the entrance."

Red John lets out something like a chuckle. "Selling what's inside to the highest bidders, is he?"

"Probably." Jane chances another small step to the side, strains his neck for a better view. "Well ―definitely."

For a moment, everything in the distance seems to go quiet and unmoving, until someone cries out in a hoarse voice, and the crowd seems to erupt like a geyser. Jane starts, and he can only watch as the crowd starts moving as if it were a dark thick wave, spitting clouds of dust into the air as people clamor towards the doors. A gunshot rings out, then another, and another ―and the crowd stills completely.

Jane feels Red John's hand close around his upper arm, and he registers being pulled to the side, into the shadows cast by a torn, singed tent sprawled atop the entrance of the building they'd found cover under. "We can't risk staying here," Red John tells him, and his voice sounds almost urgent as he gives another tug, this time harsher.

Jane's throat clenches, and he shakes his arm out of Red John's rapidly tightening grip. _Don't touch me_ , he wants to say, because, of course, _that's_ what's important in this whole theatre of insanity and desperation ―suddenly he feels stupid, and then furious at himself for feeling stupid.

"We have to _go_ ," Red John is saying, and he sounds as though he's speaking to a child, and Jane wants to hit and claw and kick that near-frightened expression off the man's face, wants to run and run and _run_ and keep running until he's miles away from Red John, until he doesn't have to see him again.

But then he remembers where he is, where _they are_ , and lets Red John drag him away through the abandoned highway and off to wherever he thinks they might be safe, and he convinces himself that he still doesn't truly care what happens, if they die or not, if they end up screaming and shoving and pulling outside of a teetering store to get their hands on a slice of bread or not, if they get swallowed in flames or not, if―

 _We're not living_ , he thinks, and he keeps walking as fast as he can beside Red John. _We simply exist_.

The road runs like a split, bleeding ribbon in front of them.

 

 

It's noon when they stop to a house secluded by acres of flat, browning grass. Jane is almost out of breath, and he can feel his legs straining, every muscle pulled taut and crying out in protest with every move he makes, but Red John's gaze is alternating between the house door and Jane's face, and he hears "This seems like a good place to spend the night, doesn't it?"

Red John says this in a casual way that makes Jane's skin crawl, as if they were a pair of traveling friends in need of a temporary accommodation before continuing their exciting journey towards their next wondrous destination. Jane takes a few moments to calm his breathing, says, "I doubt whoever lives here will be particularly friendly towards us."

He thinks he can hear hummingbirds in the distance. Red John shrugs. "Do you want me to take care of them, then, or will you do it yourself?" Upon seeing the look that flashes across Jane's features, he laughs in a way that sounds oddly genuine, amused. "I _meant_ ," he clarifies, with something like a playful tilt to his tone, "doing the _talking_. I'm sure we're both quite capable of making someone willingly let us into their home, are we not?"

Jane blinks, and Red John lets out a longsuffering sigh. "Fine. Stay here until I'm done," he says before walking up the length of the front walk and knocking on the door. Jane imagines running after him and reminding him of the very, _very_ real fear he saw in his eyes as they run from the scene at the Wal-Mart. Jane imagines that feigned look of terrible boredom on Red John's face, as if everything is okay and Jane is impossibly heavy and tiresome luggage to carry around, just going away.

The middle-aged woman that answers the door is holding a shotgun in steady hands.

Jane can't quite make out what she says, but he suspects it's something along the lines of, _Go away or I'll shoot_. The way her hands are tightening around the weapon is... explanatory enough. But somehow Red John gets her to look right at him and he gets her to let him touch her shoulder, light and steady. Jane thinks the man might have pretended to be injured, at first.

In the end, it doesn't take too long. Jane has only counted about five minutes until he sees the woman's face visibly relax and her shotgun now pointing, limp, to the ground, even though there's still a glint of tension, of something stiff and unnatural, in the way she holds herself.

This is where they'll be staying for the night.

Slowly, Jane makes his way up to the front door and follows Red John and the homeowner into the house.

When he steps through the door, Red John purses his lips and says, "I thought I told you to stay back until I was done."

"You did." He examines the line of photographs sitting over the mantle, the diminished stores of dried food hoarded hastily in the adjacent kitchen. The house as a whole is dark and quiet, the windows barred and the curtains drawn. "I just wanted to make sure we'd be invited inside without fanfare or mutilated bystanders." Jane turns to the woman, who is now looking at them both with a vacant expression, the slow beginnings of a placid smile tugging at the corners of her lips. "You hypnotized her, didn't you?"

"Of course I did not." Red John walks further into the house, and Jane doesn't take his eyes off him as he stays behind to lock the door. The woman remains silent, unmoving, and Red John starts looking around with feigned interest, as though he were in the middle of an art exhibit at a Parisian gallery. "Well, perhaps I did. You would have done the same. It wasn't _easy_ , I'll have you know. I expect it'll wear off very, very soon."

He stands very still. "You would have killed her if I hadn't walked in."

Red John shrugs. "Perhaps, perhaps not. You're here, she's alive, we have a place to stay ―so who exactly cares, Patrick? Aren't you tired, shouldn't we be getting ready for bed?"

Jane wants to say things to him, so many goddamn things, and he can't, god, he feels exhausted and this is too―

He turns to the woman, and back to Red John, and smiles. The effort of it _hurts_. "Good night, then?"

Red John returns the smile ―it's all teeth, a predatory thing in the shadows of a house that is not his own, that he intended to splatter with the blood of a woman who didn't want to let strangers inside. "Good night, Patrick."


	3. pavlov, and his dogs

It's always the spaces between seconds, the ones no one has a name for ―those quiet, stuttering intervals where you sit and contemplate and understand everything and nothing all at once. Jane knows them, and through them he knows himself and all the thoughts that claw and coil and curl inside his skull.

The absurdity (perhaps he could call it sheer impossibility) of his new life is something that makes him appreciate those moments more; they're the ones during which nothing truly happens, as if you don't exist, as if the world is air and stardust. When you can maybe think clearly, realize that you're in the grip of something vast and cold and terrible, when you realize that you're trying to keep the lifeblood from leaking through the cracks in your body, when you decide to _run_.

Jane would like to be a man concerned with self-preservation. He's almost entirely certain that he was, once. And it's those moments, always those _moments_ , when he stills and goes cold and thinks and understands how wrong everything is and how he should want to survive, how he should―

He isn't exactly sure that he wants to _die_. Decisions like that are for people who know, who are fully aware of what is happening to them, who have lived and lived and lived and reached the inevitable conclusion that all this life has finally reached its end. Jane knows, surely and without a second's doubt, that he really doesn't need to concern himself with such final thoughts, because there is no life for him left to end.

So, the thing is, he truly isn't suicidal. He just sometimes considers his options.

 

 

Red John doesn't wake him the next day, so he ends up sleeping until almost mid-afternoon.

The angle of the sun surprises him as he slips out of bed ―the window is unlocked, unbolted; he could swear there were bars behind the curtains when he walked into the bedroom last night― and for several long, long seconds, he stands there and thinks that this is the first time he's _slept_ , deeply and dreamlessly and _truly_ , in what is very likely months.

It's a vaguely unsettling thought.

He makes his way down the winding flight of stairs, feeling slightly disoriented, and comes to a sudden halt once he drifts into the kitchen. The windows are all bolted here, but all the lights are on and the room seems to glow artificial white, reflecting on the surfaces of pans and cutlery and the incongruously polished-clean tile floor. And, in the middle of it all, there's Red John, whisking eggs in a white bowl while a sliver of butter is slowly melting inside a nearby skillet.

Jane tilts his head to the side. "You're _cooking_." His voice is thick with sleep and skepticism sticks to his tongue as he consciously battles the urge to rub a hand across his eyes.

Red John glances over his shoulder at him. "When was the last time we had a proper meal? I thought I'd let you do it, but you decided to take a beauty sleep instead, for which I can't really blame you, of course."

The domesticity of the scene ―Red John with his shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows and a towel thrown over his shoulder, head bowed over bowls and frying pans― strikes Jane as both terrible and hilarious. He feels oddly amused, in a strange, detached way, and no matter how hard he looks, he can't quite reconcile this image with the nightmare of the past decade.

Wordlessly, while actively forcing himself not to think, he takes a seat on one of the kitchen counters and watches Red John pour a tablespoon of milk into the bowl.

"Where is our landlady?" he asks suddenly, just when the smell is starting to distract him.

Red John smiles up at him. "Alive and well," he says almost cheerfully. "She's taking a nap, right now. So tired. She was kind enough to get us some clothes and food for the road. Let's not forget to thank her before we go."

The pieces click together quickly enough. "She went to the Wal-Mart." A beat, "Why would you send her there? You saw how―"

"We went together, don't you worry," Red John says with an overdramatic roll of his eyes. "She was perfectly safe. It's truly inspiring, how the guards are willing to protect any civilian who approaches the doors with a handful of money. The head manager was very happy to let us in."

It's not altogether surprising; judging from all the stacked food and first aid kits Jane saw the other day, the owner of the house must be wealthier than most of Roseburg's other citizens. "There wasn't a commotion this time, then?"

"Oh, there certainly was. But, like his supervisor, one of the guards was very kind to us. He lent me his gun ―it was so helpful while pushing through the crowds."

Jane realizes that his fingers have been drumming away an abstract rhythm on the countertop. He's surprised at how not surprised he feels at what he's hearing, and angry with how not angry the news makes him.

"You got busy stealing one of the Wal-Mart guards' guns while she shopped clothes and food for you?"

A gentle huff. "That's a little too harsh, Patrick. You always assume the worst." Jane's gaze follows the movement of Red John's hands as the man pours the eggs into the pan; he doesn't need to watch his face to know that he's lying.

"How silly of me."

"I never called you _silly_ , did I?" Red John doesn't lift his own eyes from the pan as he starts stirring. "And since you brought up the subject of clothes, you should probably give your suit to Mrs. Carols to wash. It looks like you've spent over a month sleeping in it on the ground under a little tent."

"Her name is Mrs. Carols?"

"I'm fairly sure I wouldn't be calling her that if it weren't." Red John gives him a near-apologetic look. "I'm afraid there were no three-piece suits at the store, but we did get you some very fine cotton shirts and several pairs of slacks. Shoes and socks and underwear, as well. I think you'll be satisfied."

Jane manages to bite down the _thank you_ as soon as it rises up his throat.

(The voices inside his head that always scream at him how wrong this whole situation is have somehow died down, lost steam, and it makes him feel scared, almost.)

Several minutes pass in silence as he ponders what to say, and what Red John himself might be thinking. Unsurprisingly, he falls under the category of people Jane had always been begrudgingly interested in; the kind that you know the brain of, you know how it _operates_ and how it's motivated and what it produces, but despite all that it's always an endless puzzle to understand just how it works during leisure, during those fleeting moments that don't require full attention, or in situations that exceed normality and logic.

"Why didn't you wake me?" Jane asks when he can't think of a stealthier lead-in.

Red John snatches the towel from his shoulder and wraps it around the handle of the pan. "I didn't think you'd want me to," he says, casually, as he empties the entire batch of eggs onto a plate for Jane. "Besides, I had business in town."

Jane senses an opening, and with that a nagging bite of inequality in this exchange, as if there were some sort of power balance between them all along and it's been dipping towards Red John without fail. He isn't entirely sure how that makes him feel. "Really. What kind of business?"

Red John offers him a smile. "Try the eggs."

He has to resist the urge to lift an eyebrow, but Jane can't quite find it in himself to argue further, or fully care about what Red John did or didn't do while out and about. There is a part of him that wants to keep pushing until something gives, a part that nudges at his insides and tells him in a firm voice that this apathy he's forcing himself into is the worst thing he could possibly do. Perhaps one day, he'll listen to it.

He spears a clod of egg with the fork that came along with the plate and scoops it into his mouth. They're better seasoned than he expected, and the taste is ―it's _good_. He's slightly surprised.

And Red John ―Jane would laugh if he were a different man and this were a different situation―, Red John is watching him the way anyone would while waiting for a reaction to their cooking. Jane notices that he must have shaved this morning. It reminds him that he must shave too, and that he hasn't looked into a mirror in over a month.

He shrugs. "It's not bad." He grabs another bite, "What kind of business?"

Red John has already moved away from him, turning off the stove. "I'm going to start packing our bags ―I don't think we'll be staying here much longer. Meanwhile, you can take a nice warm bath. I truly don't want to sound rude, Patrick, but you desperately need it."

And with that, he's gone.

 

 

( _"What would you do if I kissed you?"_

 _For what feels like the thousandth time since the flames started swallowing everything, Jane feels as if the world around him has come to a halt, as if the earth has been thrown out of orbit. Red John is so close that he can see himself reflected in his eyes, and he thinks of throwing out his arms and pushing him into the void behind them, down with all those bodies, all those broken corpses, Lisbon_ ―

 _He can hear his own heart beating, a frantic thing, an animal caught, rattling against its cage. He can hear the blood pumping behind his ears like wild drums, like everything else has been blotted out, like it's only him and all this red inside his body, wanting to spill out, run free, just him and his blood and Red John's eyes on his, watching, waiting, waiting_ ―

_When he finally finds his voice, it's hoarse and choked and small and it almost makes him want to hide away. "I would say," he starts, and realizes that his mind has gone blank, as if the inside of his skull is nothing but empty black space. He breathes in, out. In, out. Red John is watching him. "I would say that your choice of scenery is terribly unromantic."_

_And then, there's laughter. Red John draws away, as if burned, and there's a smile like a cut across his face and he's laughing and it sounds wrong and terrible and altogether inhuman. The sun has fully risen, now, and Jane notices that the clouds have begun to dissipate. The tragedy laid out before him is illuminated in all its vast, bloodied glory._

_Jane stands, and waits, and he thinks he might be shivering. Finally, the laughter dies down._

_"_ _Romance," Red John says, and it's a soft, quiet thing. The smile is gone.)_

 

 

Apart from over a dozen piles of comfortable-looking clothes, Jane discovers that their newly acquired supplies consist of first-aid kits filled with bandages and balms and little bottles rattling with pills, bags upon bags of dry food and bottles of water, cheap alcohol, gloves and scissors and pliers and almost every kind of tool Jane knows the existence of, maps, pens, notebooks ―and handgun ammo.

When Jane stepped out of the bathroom a couple of hours ago, hair still dripping and steam inching along the tile walls, Red John walked up to him and told him that they should leave before nightfall. From what he gathered during his town visit, he said, there were larger, safer, organized cities that remained mostly intact; New York, Raleigh, Atlanta and Richmond were still hobbling on. Boston, Bridgeport and Baltimore had been evacuated lest they sink into the harbor, but the East Coast as a whole had fared far better than the rest of the States. There was already significant movement, Red John told him; hundreds upon hundreds of survivors had begun to leave everything behind in the hopes of rebuilding their lives in one of the still standing cities of the east.

"Where did you get all those bullets?" Jane asked him in a very flat, very serious tone, and Red John simply smiled and shrugged and told him to please get dressed ― _this display is so very distracting, Patrick_.

Mrs Carols looks entirely unconcerned while they're preparing to leave. She sits on a chair and watches with unfocused eyes as Red John opens up all her cabinets and snatches from inside whatever he deems he and Jane will need, only to throw it into their bags without so much as looking toward her. Jane would sincerely prefer to take a seat next to her and dispassionately watch the display, but he reasons helping out is the only thing that will not result in Red John complaining or throwing snide remarks about usefulness and cooperation.

"Where to next?" he asks as Red John routes through a hidden stash of liquor. "I assume you have a destination in mind."

Red John gives a dismissive nod as he pours himself a drink. "We could join the hordes of people traveling in line to the east," he grabs another glass, "or we could do something better and far more comfortable."

"Would you care to elaborate?"

The other man smiles. "Would _you_ care for a drink, Patrick?"

Jane brushes past him, somewhat irritated with him for always evading his questions, and yet not entirely. It's not exactly anger, that thing that sometimes gnaws inside him. He grabs the bourbon as he goes, and takes a long swig straight from the bottle.

Red John looks genuinely amused when Jane gives the bottle back to him and leans against the counter, head tilted to the side. "This is getting tiring."

"This will never stop being tiring," Red John retorts, though without any real bite in it. He finishes his glass in one long swallow and holds his hand out, gesturing to the living room where all their bags are stuffed together in the middle of the carpet. "Shall we?"

When they walk outside, the sun is almost blinding ―Jane has to squint his eyes until they get used to the sudden change. With all the windows bolted and all the curtains drawn, it had been alarmingly easy to lose track of time inside the house. Red John pulls a set of car keys from his pocket, and Jane catches sight of the black Ford Mustang in the driveway.

He blinks once, twice. "Where did the car came from." It's not a question, because he knows the answer ―as he does almost every time he asks, lately.

Red John opens the passenger door for him with a pleasant expression. "I met the lovely wife of a collector yesterday morning. She was kind enough to lend it to me."

The urge to say something and walk away and shout that _no, this is wrong_ , rises like it always does and sits like a lump in Jane's throat. He wants to say all those things and he wants to say even more and he wants to turn around and wash his hands clean of all the murders and all the―

If Red John wasn't all he had left with any resemblance to the life he had before everything was broken, he would.

 _He would_.

Once inside the car, Jane realizes just how close together they are going to be until they reach wherever it is they're going to, and he finds that the thought isn't entirely uncomfortable. They've spend countless stretching, endless nights and mornings sleeping side by side on the ground ―this should be much easier.

After Jane has made sure that they got everything packed in the backseat, Red John starts the engine ―and instead of driving, he opens the door and promptly gets out.

Jane turns in his seat. "What now?"

Oddly enough, Red John looks somewhat distracted when he answers. "I forgot to snap the wonderful Mrs Carols back to her normal self." Shutting the door closed, "I'll be back in two minutes."

Jane fumbles with the radio for several seconds before he remembers that there are no radio stations left ―and if there were, no one would bother with them. He sits in silence, head resting against the back of his seat, and he stares up at the roof of the car. He counts his breaths. He counts his heartbeats. None of it is enough to distract him from the clenching feeling in his gut, that clawing, rattling thing that makes him feel cool and numb and empty.

When Red John slips into the car again (four minutes and twenty-eight seconds later, Jane counted), the first thing Jane's gaze is drawn to is his hands. They're perfectly clean. His clothes, too.

(Should they be? he can't help but ask himself. It makes him sick. It makes him numb.)

"Is everything okay?" he asks, and it sounds hoarse. He stares at Red John, and Red John stares out at the road ahead as he starts the car.

Jane realizes that his fingers are clenched.

A faint, reassuring smile. "Everything is okay."

They leave.

 

 

His entire existence has been divided, it seems, in three jagged parts.

It's before (he and Angela holding hands; her laughter like bells on her lips, like dew droplets trembling on spring leaves; holding Charlotte in his arms for the first time; a pink tricycle and the smell of pancakes in the morning and the intoxicating taste of success).

It's after (a crisp white paper stitched carefully onto the bedroom door; a smudge of crimson, pressed by a gloved thumb, on Angela's cheek; his daughter's hair twisted and darkened by blood; a leather couch in the corner of a bustling office; Lisbon's eyes; Lisbon's smile; interrogation rooms; revenge revenge _revenge_ ―)

And it's now.

He's not sure what _now_ consists of. He supposes it's nothing but a vast, black emptiness, with splatters of blood here and there, some crimson breaking through the darkness, a flame slicing down the middle, rings of smoke curling around it.

When they left together, when the fire had died down and the sun was burning golden into the sky instead, he asked Red John what his name was. Red John laughed and it sounded like he just didn't mean it and told him, in that quiet, faraway voice, that it didn't matter. None of it would matter from now on.

And Jane supposes he was right. Because he can't, for the life of him, think of anyone or anything that matters, has a purpose, needs and has to live. Certainly not himself. Certainly not Red John.

 _And yet_ ―he always considers his options.


	4. murder ballads (for the lovelorn)

Jane wakes with a jolt, throat scratchy like sandpaper and all closed up, as if he’d been yelling, or crying. For a moment, the world is a blur of incongruous brightness, until the little pinpricks of light gradually subside and the world comes into focus. He’s in the car, which is entirely unsurprising ―but he’s also sprawled across the back seat and there’s a thick woolen blanket draped over him, which is unsettling at the very least. He remembers dozing off in the front seat, head leaning uncomfortably against the glass window. Someone moved him while he was sleeping, and the realization pokes a hole through his stomach. After a few moments, it occurs to him that his shoes are gone, as well.

(The sun has moved up the sky, suddenly blinding him. He thinks about how he’s in the middle of everything: freezing emptiness across the galaxy above him, and burning hell below. In between, countless bodies with souls in them, loving and loathing each other. The earth as a broken stage. Everything is meaningless.)

He kicks the blanket off and scrambles out of the car in a flurry of kicking limbs and messy hair, nearly falls over as his feet hit the ground. Solid rock. The last thing he remembers is passing through an open highway. The landscape is unfamiliar, colorless and vast and depressing, a single stretch of asphalt running through. Using a hand as a shield against the sun, Jane realizes he can smell himself. Sweat dries on the back of his neck, across his chest, under his armpits. Perhaps it shouldn’t bother him as much as it does, given the circumstances, but the meaning of the word “priorities” is well shaken and cracked inside him. He doesn’t care.

 He spots Red John in the distance almost immediately. A single figure in all this emptiness, a distractingly large piece of paper in his hands (a map?), a half-forgotten traveling bag somewhere to his side. As Jane walks closer, he thinks the man looks exhausted. It occurs to Jane that he still doesn’t know his name. It would humanize him _oh-so-much_.

 Under the onslaught of unforgiving sunlight, Jane almost smiles.

 “Please tell me you’re not lost,” he says, a half-joke that he doesn’t mean, because he’s absolutely sure he could not care less. Red John turns to look at him, and his eyes are like holes. (Holes in the world. Holes in his soul.)

 Everything is ugly, really.

 “There should be a forest here, of some sort,” Red John says flatly, gaze sweeping across the crumpled map. Jane suppresses the urge to yawn. “Well. I’m still fairly certain we’re headed the right way.”

 “I hope so.” Jane catches himself thinking about the guns and the bullets in the trunk of the car. There are knives as well, but knives are meant for intimacy (suffering and pleasure, the tagline goes), and somewhere along the way Jane realized he lost all desire (all _need_ ) for that. If he kills Red John… if he does it, it will be quick. It will be a way of erasing everything, at once, completely, irrevocably. Perhaps it’ll be a way of killing himself as well.

 He doesn’t try to suppress these thoughts, not ever, and he knows that Red John has not doubted for a second that his companion might try and brandish a gun at him at some point. He doesn’t seem worried, which in turn doesn’t worry Jane. That’s how it is: their endless loop, their burning circle. He’s rather used to it.

 Someone will die, eventually.

 But they’re both here now, and Red John has said something to him that Jane did not quite hear. He feels something dark hovering above him, and wonders if he’s finally become depressed, but doubts it.

 “What?”

 “I asked you,” Red John says, underlining every word in frustration, or some variation of the emotion, “if you could drive for a change. I’m fucking― I can’t do all the work all the time, Patrick. Don’t you think it’s time you acted like a _person_ instead of luggage?”

 Jane smiles with teeth. He’s always smiled in the worst possible situations. “Why won’t you say it?”

 The sun continues to burn them down, and for a moment Jane wonders how the hell he didn’t overheat inside the car, wrapped in that damned woolen blanket he didn’t even know they’d taken with. His mouth is dry, lips a desert across his face. Water. He _really_ needs some water.

 Red John looks rather impatient. “Why won’t I say what?”

 He doesn’t know why, but he takes another step forward. There is no desire to challenge, to provoke; yet his smile does not falter, and he consciously tilts his head to the side, mocking. After all, everything _is_ very much pointless, is it not? “Why won’t you say, _I’m fucking tired_. Come on, I won’t judge. I promise. Get it out of your system.”

 A sound caught between a huff and laughter. Red John is looking at him as if he can’t believe this, or as if he just doesn’t know what to say.

 And Jane… Jane doesn’t quite know why he’s doing this, himself. It doesn’t make him feel any joy. It doesn’t make him feel anything. But he smiles, and keeps on smiling, because _that_ ’s something he does know, even though he’s just woken up and it’s hot and he’s burning all over and all he wants is to get away, away, away.

 So, “Don’t worry,” Jane says, something like a teasing lilt to his voice. “I won’t consider you any less terrifying if you admit you’re exhausted and scared and completely damned lost. You’re the big bad wolf after all, aren’t you? How could I ever not be intimidated by you?”

 In the middle of this brown, overheated nothingness, Jane starts laughing. He’s… not amused. He’s not even desperate. He’s empty, he _feels_ empty, a void inside a void inside a void, and the person in front of him is a person, real and outlined and breathing and terrified, it’s all so beautifully surreal, and he just can’t stop wondering why he hasn’t killed himself already.

 Perhaps the point is that there is no point.

 He can’t decide if Red John looks angry or not, but it doesn’t matter, even though a rather detached part of him would enjoy poking Red John with a stick, just to get a reaction. Get him to lash out. That might be interesting, or it just might be nothing at all.

 The realization that he’s not afraid, that he’s not even properly hateful, blows like a wind through Jane’s chest.

  _What happened to you?_ he once wanted to ask. (The answer is probably, _nothing_.)

 In the end, Red John starts walking back towards the car. “Go fuck yourself, Patrick,” he says tiredly, and it makes Jane laugh even more.

 

 

 

A million lifetimes ago, Jane would lie in his leather couch with an arm flung over his face, listening to all the background noises of the office and thinking about Angela.

His marriage…. his marriage had moments ―ones that lasted days and weeks at a time― that made it into a train-wreck, and perhaps the bigger picture was that everything was going up in flames, but Jane would rather cut his own throat than admit it, to others or himself.

 Angela was every bit as opinionated and unconventional as her husband. Everything about her burned, and she hurt him as much as he hurt her.

 They would have stayed together until the end, and he can’t, for the life of him, decide if that was a good thing or not. He understands, now, that Angela and he were frighteningly co-dependent. And frighteningly similar. A friend of theirs had meekly suggested, once, that they visit a marriage counselor; she had let it hang in the air, the impression that their relationship wasn’t healthy. That it wasn’t _normal_.

 “Normal relationships are for normal people,” Angela had told him that night, her head laying on his chest as he stroked through her hair. He had never been more certain in his entire life that he would die without her.

 Sometimes, he feels his wife floating in the space between him and Red John.

 She burrows her way through the silent moments in the car and she rattles along with the forgotten change on the console. Unlike them both, she seems to know where they’re all going, even though she’s nothing but a memory; not even a ghost trapped in the stale air. Angela exists when they don’t speak and the landscape is the color of blood under the sun. There are moments when she’s everywhere, eclipsing all thought and reality, and there are moments Jane thinks he might end up forgetting her name.

 “What did she say to you as she died?” he almost asks once, but he stops himself before it gets that far.

 

 

 

They spend four days driving, never stopping except for when they find a run-down gas station in the middle of nowhere that still has any gas. Twice they pass through small towns where the people are still staggering on, and while Red John is inclined to drive the fastest through those, Jane makes a point of reminding him that this isn’t some cliché neo-noir road-trip movie and that the only healthy thing to do is stop and get some semblance of rest before they continue driving to wherever Red John thinks there might be any form of proper civilization left.

 The second time they make a stop, it’s in a small town that is listed on their tattered map as Douglas.

  _Wyoming_ _?_ Jane thinks, incredulous, and realizes a bit too late that he has said it out loud. “We’ve been driving through _Wyoming_ all day?”

 From the passenger’s seat, Red John stares outside the window like he’s inspecting a new purchase for imperfections. “The landscape _has_ changed quite dramatically,” he says, tone light. “I was hoping for some rivers and geysers, and all we got was rocks and deserts and all this… abominable _heat_. Oh well.”

 Jane’s fingers flex around the steering wheel. Oh well, indeed.

 “I don’t think there were many people here to begin with, anyway,” Red John continues. He might as well be talking to himself. There is a vague sort of unease hanging around him like a dark cloak, and Jane suddenly feels very aware. Of what, he isn’t sure.

 Around them, everything looks abandoned and grey and impossibly old, but Jane is driving slowly enough to notice lights behind some windows. The town as a whole seems fairly intact, if not wholly drained of life and color.

 It’s strange. The world _feels_ strange.

 Jane thinks about the guns in the trunk.

 “Do you think we should get anything from here before we go?” Red John asks, quiet but incongruously urgent, and Jane looks at him over his shoulder for the space between two seconds before turning back to the road and the sideline buildings.

 “Are you really going to take my opinion into consideration?” he shoots back, but he can hear himself, and there’s no real bite in it. (Oh well, indeed.)

 The rustling of paper. Jane sees the map in the periphery of his vision, being flung onto the dashboard like trash. “Of course I will.” Red John sounds agitated, now, and it almost piques Jane’s interest. “Perhaps we should find an empty house to spend the night. But we have to hide the car.”

 “Why.”

 It isn’t a question. Jane drives in front of a Mc Donald’s, bright yellow-red sign half fallen off. The whole building is dark like something out of a horror movie.

 “There,” Red John says, ignoring him altogether. “The exit on the left leads to that neighborhood, do you see it? We’ll find something there.”

 “Really.” Jane, in turn, doesn’t argue. He steers the wheel and he thinks his ears are buzzing. Radio static. Theirs is the only car on the road, and Jane is blinded by red when the new angle brings them directly under the sun. He blinks rapidly through it, feeling his eyes water. “Will you tell me your real name?” he asks suddenly, surprising himself.

 Oh well, oh well.

 A sharp exhale of breath. “Just drive, Patrick.”

 

 

 

( _“Romance,” Red John says, and it’s a soft, quiet thing. The smile is gone._

_They spend what feels like hours in silence._

_The earth has gone quiet like death, and terror has become as normal as breathing._

_V_ _erfremdungseffekt. He thinks he understands it, now. Even if one space is you, and the other the world and all its blood._

_So he breathes, and thinks he can hear Red John breathe in sync with him. It’s strangely calming in its effect, a semblance of peace, and Jane knows this is the calm after the storm. Perhaps the only thing that can follow a breakdown is a sense of dissociation._

Will _Red John kiss him? The concept isn’t horrifying, because Jane rationalizes that perhaps he won’t feel anything. But, really, it was only words to fill up empty space. Not a threat, not a promise. If it does happen and Jane manages to feel enough of it, he’s very, very certain he will vomit._

_A mess upon a mess._

_Something has to break the silence: it starts to remind Jane of a stray cat on the asphalt, hit by a car that didn’t stop. Half-dead. Ripped in two, splattered across the road. Everyone feels so sorry for it, and no one can stand its dying wails. It keeps crying, crying, crying, and it’s going to die, it’s so self-aware._

_“Will you, then?” Jane asks, and it’s a stranger. He’s floating, seeing himself from above, frozen across from a man he wants (wanted?) to rip the beating heart out of, and everything is up in smoke. In his mind, the asphalt is painted red.  
_

_Red John tilts his head to the side. Is it a conscious thing? Jane wonders this for the entirety of a single second. “Will I what?”_

_“Kiss me.”_

_He just wishes the screaming would stop, but the worst thing is that he knows there is no one screaming.)_

 

 

 

The house Red John picked is as remote as it is dark and empty, which he said suits them just fine. A quick search through all three floors left no room for doubt that the owner(s) grabbed everything they could and left as soon as the ground started shaking.

 It’s almost midnight, or so Jane has calculated, and there still hasn’t been a single person on the road, but Jane knows there must be _someone_ out there. He felt it: the movement, the hushed voices behind walls and bolted doors.

 Ghost-humans.

 Ghost-life.

 To hell with ghosts.

 Red John bolted the doors and windows as well, pulled heavy wood and metal across the frames like a man preparing for a hurricane. Jane found it funny, until he didn’t. He understands desperation: he knows there are people who would kill for the car, the dry food, the guns. He understands.

 But it’s quiet now, the night wrapping the town like black wings. They’re not in danger, and Jane comes out of the shower to find Red John in the empty kitchen, staring at the wall. There’s a cigarette held carelessly between his fingers, and the smoke swirls in the air like the aftermath of invisible flames. The paint where the wall meets the linoleum floor is cracking, peeling away.

 Jane swallows all his hatred down inside his stomach to fester and stick.

 “Where did you find the cigarettes?” he asks, because it’s how you make conversation. He doesn’t know why he wants to make conversation. A set of eyes appears in his mind, not as blue as Angela’s, not as green as Lisbon’s. To hell with ghosts. (He wants to cry.)

 Red John shrugs, and Jane almost doesn’t catch it. “Had them since Roseburg.” More serious, more focused, “Have you really not noticed them before?” Jane doesn’t answer, but he makes sure his face is an open question mark. He’s good at expressions like that. The smoke is making him want to vomit, or maybe that’s just his brain. “I’ve smoked a dozen times in front of you since we left, Patrick.”

  _No, you haven’t_.

 Jane isn’t distrustful enough of his own mind to believe he’s been missing chunks of time and albums of live images. Dissociation isn’t the same as falling away.

 Feeling heavy, he drags a chair and doesn’t wince at the god-awful sound it makes across the floor. Sits down opposite Red John, and very determinedly keeps silent and statuesque. Is he waiting for something? He’s not quite sure, but he’s not going to dive into it, not first.

 All this smoke is making him sick.

 Red John smiles a little through the grey, but his eyes are dead. Or maybe they’re too alive. Jane knows too well that those are two sides of the same coin. Half the cigarette falls off on the kitchen table, burnt, ash everywhere.

 “I’m glad you finally got to take a proper shower. You were starting to stink again.”

 Jane remains wholly impassive. “So were you.”

 The smile melts off, and Jane idly wonders what things might have made Red John genuinely smile, before. Discourses on the various methods of torture, perhaps. Illegal obscure snuff films? The bad kind of rough porn? Or comedies starring Peter Sellers?

 To hell with ghosts.

 “Touché,” Red John says softly, taking another final drag. Jane watches the invisible line the cigarette draws in the air as he flicks it on the ground. “Are you here because you want to talk, Patrick?”

  _I don’t know why I’m here_ , he wants to say, but he doesn’t know if it’s true. He tells himself to be careful; this is how people end up turning to religion.

 “Let’s talk, then,” Red John continues, voice always the same, that monotone soft thing that carries and makes Jane want to hurl something across the room as much as it soothes him. It’s weird. He feels weird. “What do you want me to tell you?”

 What _does_ Patrick Jane want to know about him? He’s thought about it so much it’s become a chore. A couple of months ago, the answer would have been easy as breathing. _Nothing_ , he would say. When you’re faced with the man who murdered your life, you don’t want to get to know him. You only want to kill him.

 Things are different, now. Maybe.

 “Your name would be a good enough start,” Jane says, makes sure to sound bored. He’s not entirely surprised when Red John answers with a sharp laugh, mirthless.

 “How many times do I have to tell you that it. Doesn’t. Matter.”

 “You’re right,” Jane concedes. Is there a point or purpose to this? “It doesn’t. At the end of the day, you don’t matter, either.”

  _That_ seems to garner a genuine reaction, of only epidermic. Red John shifts on the chair. Smiles again, a mask hiding something else underneath. “We both know that’s not quite true.”

 “Right.” Jane isn’t feeling particularly eloquent, but he’s not feeling particularly fond of self-preservation, either. Be it preservation of the soul ―or whatever else. “Another question, then.”

 Smile widens. “Shoot.”

 “What do you want from me?” As soon as he’s uttered the words, he wishes he could take them back. He doesn’t know why. “ _Now_ , I mean. After everything, after―” an intake of air and secondhand smoke, “Now. What is it that you want, now?”

 The silence stretches on like a cat dying on the side of the road.

 (The guns are in the trunk. Always in the trunk. Or did Red John take them inside the house for the night?)

 “You.”

 Jane blinks. Slowly, with method, he tries to convince himself that this is a surprise. That he didn’t know this ―that he hadn’t known this for years. He can work his way into shock. He… must.

 “Me.”

 Red John just stares, with his eyes that are dead-but-too-alive, holes in his face like gunshots. How much would he bleed if someone clawed them out? “You. I want you.”

 Jane’s thoughts become a question mark.

 He wishes he could scream. He wishes he _wanted_ to scream.

 Jane sits very, very still. “I hope you understand that it is never going to happen,” he says calmly. A void inside a void, still.

 Everything is somewhat of a blur. Red John leans forward, elbows on the table, and Jane’s first instinct isn’t to pull away ―this concerns him. There’s a smile like a knife wound on the face in front of him. “It can happen, more so than it already has,” Red John says, equally as calmly. But there’s something there, something else, something decidedly _human_. “You can be mine. And I… I can be yours.”

 Jane could use a good scream.

 It won’t come.

 “…it’s late,” he ends up saying, voice small. To his mild surprise, Red John does not further press the subject ( _is_ it really one?), does not argue, does not, does not, does not―

 “Good night,” is all he says. It’s soft and gentle, and his hand touches Jane shoulder as he walks past him to disappear behind the door.

 Jane stays in the kitchen, alone, for more than two hours. He counted: breathed in and out and in and out, focusing on pinpricks of black on the empty wall until his eyes hurt. His body has gone numb, his insides feel like something broken and sizzling.

 He moves as quietly as he can humanly manage, walks up the stairs and down the corridor to the room he knows Red John has occupied for the night. The carpet inside drowns out his footfalls as he approaches the bed.

 Breathing even, chest rising and falling quietly, slowly, rhythmically. Jane spends no less than five minutes making sure Red John is well asleep.

 It’s easy after that. It’s easy while he slips into a pair of jeans and a comfortable shirt and shoes. It’s easy while he throws clothes and dry food and bottles of water and pills of all sorts into a single duffel bag. It’s easy as he slides the wooden planes off the front door with careful, silent precision. It’s easy as he slips out into the night and heads straight for the car, waiting for him like a sleeping beast in the driveway.

 The map is still on the dashboard, crumpled like an old newspaper. The leather seat is cold.

 Jane makes his decision, at that point, without much thought. He jams the keys in the ignition with more force than necessary, and doesn’t look behind his shoulder as he pulls onto the road.

 The ghost town and Red John bleed away, they slip into the distance, and then out of sight and thought altogether as he heads East.


	5. slaughterhouse no. 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First of all, I am _so_ sorry I haven't replied to comments, but for some reason the site is eating everything up. I'll try again sometime later. I cherish everything you guys leave in that little box.
> 
> So. I wrote most of this chapter ages ago, before the previous one, so maybe that's why the update was quicker? *awkward laugh*
> 
> There's a POV shift along the way, and there'll be more of those to come, along with more of Jane and RJ's first "scene" together. I hope it's not confusing, because I couldn't resist little past!RJ morsels. He and Jane might be apart for now, but this is really not over yet. This is still (and will be 'till the end) a Jane & RJ story.

At sunrise, Jane finds himself standing by a lakeshore.

He doesn’t know how long he’s been driving, but the gas tank was half-empty when he turned off the engine and stepped out of the car, leaving the door open wide.

Everything around him is a kaleidoscopic blur of cool sunlight, muted shades of ice blue and silver dancing in the periphery of his vision. The water is a two-way mirror: light catches and reflects and spreads out around, blinding him, scattered diamond droplets across the water like little dead stars.

It’s quiet and cold and beautiful.

He feels… light. Translucent. Like he might float away and get lost between all the clouds, only there are no clouds. There’s a shiver running down his spine like a serpent biting at him, but the world is peaceful, vast silence and a calm, calm coolness echoing off the sparkling water. The sun is moving faster up, up, up, faster with every second that passes. It’s like a silent heartbeat.

Like _his_ heartbeat ―only this is different, because he can feel it rattling in his bones, in every crevice of his insides. It hurts. It hurts like someone had looked at him and frowned, decided that he’d been made up all wrong, and carefully pulled him apart at the seams before putting him back together again.

The stitches, they never quite healed the right way.

The sun continues to race across the expanse of blue above his head, and Jane remembers his daughter.

Charlotte’s face… it had been clean, spotless, and he’d smeared red all over it while he held her head between his hands and tried to shake life back into her. She’d been so small. _So small_. The memory is a dark blur, TV static in black and white, one that he can never replay clearly in his mind, and not for lack of trying.

There was a piece of hair on the floor, beside her bed. A thick blond curl, matted with blood. Like someone had wrapped a hand around it and ripped it from her head. Like someone had pulled her up, like someone had turned her face around.

(In the psychiatric ward, a nurse dropped the tray of bland, sterile food she’d been carrying and rushed to Patrick Jane’s side, crouched down next to him on the tiled floor. With shaking but firm hands, she’d grabbed his wrists and pulled his arms down to his sides to stop him from ripping all his hair out from his head.

He hadn’t been screaming.

“You need… you need so much force,” he told her, quiet, looking at her with dead eyes. Eyes like pits. “For a single lock of hair. So much force.”

They changed his medication the same day.)

Jane realizes he’s on his knees when he feels the wet coolness of the grass seep through the fabric of his pants. There’s an ant, tiny and red and quick, running frantically across his leg. He feels light, so light―

He vomits in the clear sparkling water, and the sun nearly blinds him when he finally looks up.

 

 

Somewhere in Iowa, there’s a girl named Bambi ―she dared him to laugh, one eyebrow raised, belligerent; “You don’t know what it’s like to have a trailer trash telenovela-addict for a mom, pretty boy”― who ends up in the passenger seat of the Mustang, feet propped up on the dashboard and an arm flung out of the open window.

It was a gas station. It looked… mostly intact, and the car wouldn’t make it another half mile without a refill. Jane was mildly surprised to find one of the pumps was still working, and that the place wasn’t as empty as he’d first believed.

The girl hadn’t asked him to take her along. She hadn’t even talked to him; she looked at him from across the station, bright eyes darting between him and the car, following his every move, dirty chin held up in determination. She was standing her ground, every muscle in her body pulled taut, ready to fight or run. A thin, half-wild mirage backlit by the tawdry sun.

Jane approached her like he might an injured deer in the middle of a highway.

She’s sprawled out in the leather seat, looking out at the long stretches of dry brown land they pass through. The air smells like rain, the car filled with the muffled sounds she makes as she munches on potato chips that look like a one way ticket to an all-nighter date with a toilet.

They don’t talk for a long, long while, until something has to give.

“So,” she says, high and lilting, her gaze lazily sliding along his profile. “New York, huh.”

Jane’s grip on the wheel is lighter than it’s been in days. There were moments when he thought about crashing the car into a tree or a brick wall at full speed, but he feels… cleaner, now. Weightless. He finds that the vague promise of rain in the graying sky has opened up something inside him, something he can’t quite name.

And Bambi… for a moment, just a single moment, he was absolutely certain that he wanted nothing in the world but to protect this slip of a girl, make sure that all this bottomless fury and anguish across her face disappeared like a magician’s deck of cards. When she nodded at him, a sharp way acknowledging him as a non-threat back at the gas station, and tentatively introduced herself, he felt like he wanted to cry.

“Yes,” he says, and tries to smile. He’s not exactly sure it works, but she doesn’t seem to mind. He wonders just how many layers she’s hiding under, or if there are none at all. She looks like she’s floating somewhere in the middle, she looks like she’s as lost as he is. “I heard it’s still standing. …Mostly. People are trying to rebuild, there. It’s a, well, reasonable destination.”

“Mm.” She grabs more chips with thin, dirty fingers, keeps staring at him like she’s expecting something, anything. She’s a mess of bottle blond curls that have seen far better days and big brown eyes that dart around like she’s waiting for someone to jump at her with a knife behind a shadow. The small silver hoops lining her ears dangle and clink together with every turn of her head, and even like this, with hollowed cheeks and wearing filthy clothes three sizes too big, she looks like she can’t be a day older than nineteen.

“Is there anywhere else you were planning to go?” he asks, half-hesitant. It feels… surreal. _Un_ real. “I can take you, if you want.”

She laughs, and it fills him up like bells chiming. There is the sudden urge to laugh along with her, but with it comes the almost-certain possibility that it will all end up turning into shaking, silent sobs. Or something of the sort. And he just ―he just wishes it would _rain_ already.

“Sure,” she says, shaking her head as she cracks open a can of soda that he almost reaches over to snatch from her hands. The girl is courting food poisoning, truly. She blows stray curls away from her face with a half-smile that doesn’t reach her eyes. “Got at least half a dozen appointments scheduled for the week. Business, all of 'em. Glad to know I’ve finally got a chauffeur.”

He can tell it didn’t come out the way she wanted to, and it doesn’t really do anything for the heaviness that settles around them like a vice; but he smiles at her joke nonetheless, and the effort of it is less than he thought. It comes easily, almost, and when he chances a sideways glance at her he finds that she’s staring at him, still, like she’s trying to find something between the lines of his face but can’t.

He thinks of a different set of eyes, searching him over for weakness, looking at him like something to be caught. _Eaten up_.

This is not the time to think about blood.

And Bambi’s still looking at him like that. Uncertain. Wary. Everything hidden, carefully tucked away, under the façade of unconcerned bravery. Jane knows all about masks. (His own, and other, crueler ones.)

He realizes he can’t take it. Not from her. Not from someone so alive and broken and human, human, _human_ ―

“What is it?” he asks, voice slicing through the silence, because he just has to say _something_. He has to know that he can trust this girl, and that she can trust him, and he has to keep himself from thinking that he doesn’t know what he’ll do now that he’s found someone, someone so different, different, different from―

doesn’t know what he’ll do―

“Look,” she says, and this is new, this isn’t high-pitched and flighty. Her big brown eyes are set on him, unwavering, cutting like knives. Cutting him open. He keeps his own gaze on the road ahead. “Look. I’m… I’m grateful and all that you’re giving me a ride. Truly. _A lot_. I mean, I know I was dead meat back there, I was gonna walk the whole way to the first town I could find, but it’s not ―hell, I’d probably pass out half-way, and anyway, it’s not like you _had_ to take me with, not your responsibility, so thank you, really, I―” She catches herself. A sharp inhale. “Listen. I don’t… have anything. Like, nothing. At all. So I can’t give you... so if you want anything in return, I mean, just drop me off on the side of the road, I’ll walk, because, really, I’m not ―I _don’t_ have anything. And I’m not… Look. I know you maybe want me to― just saying this now so there won’t be any misunderstandings, okay, I’m not doing shit to you, I―”

Something cold blows through his stomach.

Oh.

 _Oh_.

The landscape has stopped moving backwards; he wonders when he stopped the car. He doesn’t remember stopping the car.

And she looks trapped. She looks like she’s ready to _pounce_.

“Bambi―”

“I said there’s no. _way_.”

 _Fuck_.

His head is a mess of a million tiny waves breaking on the hull of a wooden ship in the middle of a storm. There’s a girl and she’s folded in on herself and her hair is a mess like a broken, neon halo around her face; he thinks that maybe she will kill him, and maybe he won’t mind.

For a split second, for a single breath, the world turns strawberry red.

It all comes pouring out of him, then, bursting from his mouth like canaries; apologies and promises and things he doesn’t know the meaning of, things he doesn’t know were bottled up inside him, blooming like welts across his chest. He isn’t sure if he’s screaming or whispering or crying, he isn’t even sure who he’s talking to, but there’s a girl and she’s slowly unfolding like a paper crane and she’s terrified, but she stares at him with great sad eyes and he wonders what she’d look like with an open throat and bloodied hair, wonders if he’d be able to save her.

There are hands on his shoulders. Thin fingers, thin wrists, bird-like bones that are stronger than they seem.

She’s _shaking_ him.

Her eyes are huge, he thinks. Huge and dark and dead and so, so sad.

Hours pass, but it’s very likely only minutes. The thing is, he finds himself sitting in the mud outside, dirt everywhere, his back against the side of the car, face turned up to the sky. He is cold, but it’s the good kind of cold, and the rain washes over him in little rivers he wishes he could trace the patterns of.

He’s… calm.

Bambi is sitting next to him, soaked as if she’d been swimming, her clothes clinging to her thin frame like a butterfly’s cocoon. Melting off. It keeps raining, and they keep still, silent, shoulders touching.

The images flash across the insides of his skull; he sees himself fumbling with his seatbelt and scrambling out of the car, falling down on all fours in the dirt, picking himself back up and trying to get away, away, _away_. A wave of embarrassment washes over him, but Bambi is here, like nothing happened. Maybe she’s seen worse.

Like a hit to the head with a hammer, it occurs to him that they’ll most definitely catch a cold.

“Feel better now?” she asks, voice soft. Careful.

She’s so sweet it makes him want to kill someone for her, until he reminds himself that she’s not a ghost. She’s not, she’s not―

“Yeah,” he says, surprised that it’s not a lie. The rain rings in his head, pumps with the blood behind his ears. “Yes. Very. Are you okay?”

She hums, nodding a little. “We should get back in the car.”

“We should.” They don’t move. It’s peaceful, until he feels something clench around his heart. “Bambi. Bambi, I will never―”

“Yeah. I know.” She shrugs, and suddenly looks so much like a child that it _hurts_. “It’s just. Couldn’t be sure, y' know? One can never… okay, look, let’s just forget about this, right?”

Once they’re back on the road, she’s shivering like a stray pup in the winter and he’s dug up every single sweater and blanket he could find in his bag, refused to start the car until she was wrapped up in ten layers of cotton and wool.

“Who is it?” she asks suddenly, and her voice is already closed-up and scratchy. It stopped raining about an hour ago, and there’s something still in the air, something tense and electric. It’s better, he decides, than dry, red heat.

“What do you mean?”

“That guy. You kept talking about this guy… y' know. Before. When we were outside the car, before it started raining.”

She’s hesitant. Feels the mistake in the silence that follows. He thinks he can hear her swallow, and she leans her head against the window, looking outside. “Sorry,” she mumbles. “I shouldn’t… I mean, that wasn’t a good moment back there. Shouldn’t bring it up.”

It’s all copper wiring and jagged thorns. Jane swallows, tastes something metallic, something desperately vile, at the back of his throat. “No one,” he says. “He’s no one at all.”

 

 

 

[It didn’t start with blood, no matter what they might recall at a later time. It was quiet and unassuming and altogether unimportant, their beginning. Small. Unfitting, perhaps.

Truthfully, when he saw Patrick Jane for the first time, he forgot him not soon after.

There was a lingering, vague impression of pristine blue fabric, a gelled tangle of blond hair and sharp eyes that didn’t always smile when his mouth did. He was just another showman exploiting the naïve, as far as Red John could see, with an admittedly above-average intellect and a natural calling for playful deceit, and for a long time Red John didn’t think much of him.

As a general rule, Red John didn’t think much of _anyone_.

It was chance, purely, and it didn’t stick with him because Patrick Jane meant next to nothing at the time; the TV was on and the _Psychic!_ headline glared and glowed and seemed, for a moment, more interesting than the rest.

He changed the channel in less than ten minutes. The man’s theatrics were far too gaudy for his liking and he’d never had much patience for the simpering, gullible fools the audience seemed to consist of.

 

 

A few months before he turned eighteen, he learned that dried blood smells differently than when it’s fresh, bright, flowing. He learned how to clean it off clothes, sheets, tiles, concrete. Contrary to what he’d previously believed, it was not impossible.

A few months after he turned nineteen, he learned that handling a kitchen knife and a switchblade were two entirely different things, and that the way they cut under flesh that wasn’t his own and peeled back layers of skin brought a strange thrill, a wild sort of completion that he had never known existed.

At twenty, he learned that attachment to _anything_ is the surest way to secure your demise. All feelings that surpassed mere admiration and respect, that went beyond the thin, prohibitive line of detached affection, were reserved solely for people who were victims, targets, who belonged to society’s mindless herds.

 _Obsession_ , he found out, was the pinnacle of human idiocy, the undisputed method to self-destruction. (It is not something that’s easy to forget ―somehow, it will become.)

 

 

The second time, it was a vague sort of amusement, maybe a sliver of half-hearted admiration flickering weakly in there as well.

Patrick Jane, Red John understood as his living room glowed a muted blue when the TV screen lit up, was like the outlaws of the old world, those who not only defied specific sets of rules, but denied them altogether with flair and flamboyance. He could respect the man for his brash disregard for the simple-minded alone, but as much as he appreciates a good performer, he appreciates a subtle performer more.

The man smiled wide and bright and plastic, and under the dazzling studio lights, it looked almost belligerent. Red John could like this, he decided, the effortless way this _Patrick Jane_ had of holding his audience in the palm of his hand while outright mocking them, laughing in their faces. It’s a dance that he had always appreciated; stealing from someone while you smile at them and make them love you. It was so similar to hunting, he felt, to keeping your teeth hidden and testing just how close you could get to them before they started running.

It’d be almost… beautiful, if it weren’t so―

 

 

Red John watched him, sometimes.

It didn’t happen often enough to be called a habit, but it was an indulgence nonetheless, and he found himself equal parts irked and amused by this bright, talented fraud.

A trinket to toy with, or a valuable partner; oddly, inexplicably, the flashy showman could have the potential to be both, and this unusual dichotomy was what rendered him off-limits, precarious. Red John did not take risks.

 _Still_.

A woman from the audience cried as Patrick Jane told her of her grandmother’s last words, and for a moment, Patrick’s eyes flashed and the ghost of a self-satisfied smile flickered across his face, and yes, he could be _so_ very―

A penchant for unveiling the hidden, smothered monsters in others. Red John had always had that.

 

 

Over the years, there were women and there were men.

Some were interesting, some were pleasing, but most were forgettable. And they did not matter, not really; as a general rule, he never _wanted_ people he planned on keeping around for an extended period of time. Most were nothing but means to an end, some were a capricious whim, and at the end of the day they were all disposable and none left a single stain behind.

And the _wanting_ ― well.

It was always about making sure it did not reach too far and too deep. Lust is better kept ephemeral. Affection, as well, no matter how rarely it might occur.

(It is the main reason he let the beautiful, loving little Rosalind in that warm house fade into his past, willed himself to consider her as another finished pleasure that no longer had a place in his life.

And she _was_ sweet. In that naïve, delicate way of hers. He did not regret the time he spent with her, but perhaps he would have grown tired of her melancholic love had he kept her around for longer.)

Longing is a perilous thing; he learned this quickly enough, and he grew with plans to never forget it. It didn’t make him feel empty. It didn’t make him feel anything.

So he called himself clever ― _enlightened?_ ― and was astute, yet nothing could prepare him for the emerging battle smothered tightly within. Locked inside him under bone, muscle and skin. Simmering, waiting, _waiting_.

Madness, impulse, he had no name for it. The blind plunge into some dark sub-universe of irrationality and inexplicable emptiness, he found himself suddenly restless and _longing_.

For something.

Someone―]

 

 

 

Over the course of the next two and a half days, Jane makes up a small list of things he knows about Bambi that she hasn’t bothered to tell him, and that _he_ will probably not tell _her_.

  1. Her parents were dead before the world started breaking, but she still lost _someone_ who mattered like blood to her that day. A sibling?
  2. She’s not nineteen; she might not even be eighteen yet. She was probably at school when the first earthquake struck.
  3. Like Jane himself, she has _run_. From things, to things, Bambi has run like hell, has been running since she was a little kid.
  4. She wants to trust him. She wants to believe that she will fight her way through this with someone at her side. She wants to stop herself from feeling sorry for him and for herself. She wants someone alive and sane and _there_ in her life as much as he does.



“Are you married?” she asks him, blurts it out like she wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to know. For a single, near-comical moment, she looks like she might clap a hand over her mouth in embarrassment.

She sits cross-legged on the hood of the car, hair a silver-yellow riot all over, feet bare. There’s a blanket thrown over her shoulders and chipped nail polish still left in small pieces, crusting neon pink, on her toes. Her mouth is full; she certainly appreciates canned food more than he does. She’s gulping down god-awful potatoes and beans like someone who hasn’t had anything to eat in weeks.

Jane looks up from trying to smooth out the edges of the wrinkled map.

“It’s just―” she fumbles a little with the leftovers at the bottom of the can, averting her gaze, “You’re wearing a ring, that’s all. Don’t mean to be, uh, intrusive.”

Unconsciously, his finger slides across the thin stretch of platinum. “I was married, yes.”

It’s sunset, orange and bloodied and bright, one of those times when Jane feels like he’ll choke on his own heartbeat. But Bambi… Bambi is so clearly defined, so clearly a person. He can talk to her, and he can listen to her, without every word feeling like the precision of a bullet between his lungs.

She peers at him and he knows she won’t press him; his chest tightens with something liquid and warm at the thought that she truly, genuinely, does not want to hurt him by asking about potentially painful things.

He wants to say _something_ , but can’t quite find the words he wants. That is mostly a lie; because it’s there, everything, on the tip of his tongue. But he thinks they’ve scared each other enough already, and he wants ―he _needs_ ― this to work out. He… he had no idea how much he wanted to not be alone with ghosts, until he wasn’t any more.

“I think we should start driving again,” he tells her, careful not to sound too urgent.

But she’s a smart girl who’s lived through fire and cities falling in on themselves, and her eyes are on him, doe-like. Cautious.

She just looks at him for several endless seconds, and he’s still holding the map, and she looks otherworldly in the red half-light. She reminds him of an owl.

“Are we running from someone?” She says this quietly, and something makes him want to turn the car around and drive all the way back to Douglas, Wyoming, with a gun in his hand―

 _However_.

“No,” he tells her, “of course not,” soothing and careless and he knows, he knows she knows he’s lying, but she wraps the blanket tighter still around her shoulders and she jumps off the car, gives him a wide smile that stretches across her face like broken stitches.

“Okay.” The tin can rolls to the ground, catching and reflecting a sliver of fading sunlight. There’s no one around to complain about it. There’s no one around for miles. “Okay. Let’s go.”


End file.
